My Ottershaw Days

A Memory of Ottershaw.

My first memory of Ottershaw was the big freeze in the early 50's when, with a friend's help, I built a snow wall across Bousley Rise near to the top of the hill just before our house "Lintons". My father James Daborn [Jim] was not best pleased at having to dig a way through on getting back from work. My mother [Marjorie Daborn] was a teacher at the primary school, then on the crossroads of Brox Road, Slade Road and Bousley Rise with a still functioning air raid shelter - though thankfully we did not have to use it. . I got no favours as the teacher's son as I remember the day my mother punished me for chasing other children with a stinging nettle by slapping the back of my legs with the same nettle - I can still feel the resultant stings. We used to sit in a semi circle in readiness to the "Listen with Mother" programme on the radio - in a varnished wooden cabinet that needed to be opened before the broadcast's signature tune followed by the words -"Children are you sitting comfortably - now I will begin".

Ottershaw was a small village then, surrounded by commons and open fields. I could travel far and wide by bike, and later by pony without meeting a car or the sound of any engine. Bousley Rise was a dirt road with big grass verges on which I used to tether my pony to graze. Some welcomed their grass being trimmed others complained of the flies! I attended the Ottershaw Junior school, down the hill from the church, where I sang as a choir boy. One of the classrooms at the school was a corrugated iron shed which was bitterly cold in winter despite the efforts to warm it using a coke filled pot bellied stove. Mr Morgan was the headmaster

Brook Hall was our community centre and I attended many a Xmas party, pantomime and jumble sale there. My father often played in the band - being accomplished at a range of instruments, a gift alack I did not inherit - but it seems fortunately to have passed through to James one of my son's. I was fascinated by the heavy red stage curtains that I was convinced was weighted down by valuable coins that I could feel in the hemming. I managed to work one free and was mortified to find they were just discs of lead.

Hunts, the coal merchants and coach hire. Strides, the iron mongers, the post office and of course the Otter were all prominent landmarks of the village that I fondly think back on. The four cross roads junction, by the Otter with roads to Woking, Chertsey, Addlestone and Chobham was the starting point, in my late teens, of many a hitch hiked journey across UK and Europe. My travels ultimately took me to Vet School and then to Africa where I sill live and work.

I revisited Ottershaw earlier this year on a recce for a venue to celebrate my 70th. I recognised so much from when I was here as a boy - in reality very little has changed other than cheek to jowl red brick where there was once green fields. My celebration will be in the Brook Hall, where so many memories will flood back to me, including, I hope, the strains from my father's band playing Auld Lang Syne.

Chris Daborn